Hunt's phoney war of words with Gove

When the smoke has cleared in the exchange between Michael Gove, the education secretary, and Tristram Hunt, his Labour shadow, over how to assess the First World war as we approach its 100^th anniversary, we are back almost exactly to where the major parties were in August 1914.

On August 5, the Liberal prime minister Herbert Asquith informed parliament that Britain was  now at war with Germany. The Tory opposition backed his statement as did the Labour Party. A vote on an emergency war budget was carried unanimously in the House of Commons the next day.

A little over four years later, 15 million soldiers would lay dead on the battlefields of Europe and the Middle East, sacrificied in a war fought for the division and redivision of the world and its resources by the major imperialist powers.

Of course, Hunt doesn’t see it that way. Why would he? Historian Hunt is concerned only to defend the right to view the conduct of the war critically against charges from Gove this is unpatriotic. Otherwise Hunt is an enthusiast, noting with pride in the Observer that “appeals by trade union leaders to oppose German aggression, particularly against Belgium, led more than 250,000 of their members to enlist by Christmas 1914, with 25% of miners volunteering before conscription”.

Yet, less than two years before, as war loomed, the socialist Second International, of which Labour was a member, unanimously adopted a manifesto at a Congress in Basel, which declared unambiguously:

“It would be insanity for the governments not to realise that the very idea of the monstrosity of a world war would inevitably call forth the indignation and the revolt of the working class. The proletarians consider it a crime to fire at each other for the profits of the capitalists, the ambitions of dynasties, or the greater glory of secret diplomatic treaties.”

The manifesto insisted that if war threatens to break out, it is the “duty of the working classes and their parliamentary representatives in the countries” to exert “every effort in order to prevent the outbreak of war by the means they consider most effective”. Further, the manifesto urged:

“In case war should break out anyway it is their duty to intervene in favour of its speedy termination and with all their powers to utilize the economic and political crisis created by the war to arouse the people and thereby to hasten the downfall of capitalist class rule.”

These fine sentiments were swiftly abandoned, swept aside by a wave of crude nationalism and patriotism that Labour and the trade union bureaucrats joyfully went along with. Ramsay Macdonald, a pacifist opposed to the war, was quickly replaced by Arthur Henderson as Labour leader.

A similar course was adopted by the powerful German Social Democratic Party. Workers were despatched to fight for the Kaiser and the Fatherland while their counterparts in Britain were told that there was nothing more glorious than sacrificing their lives for King and Country.

Needless to say, the Second International collapsed as a result of these great betrayals.

By the end of August, the Labour Party and the TUC had declared an “industrial truce” for the duration of the war and lent their support to an all-party recruitment campaign. By May 1915, there were three Labour MPs in the Coalition government, with Henderson in the cabinet.

Soon, however, strikes broke out in munitions factories and the shop stewards’ movement was founded. As the slaughter in Europe reached new heights, enthusiasm for the war drained away and the government introduced conscription 1916. The punitive terms imposed by France, Britain and the allies at the end of the war contributed to the causes of the Second World War 20 years later.

So Mr Hunt, spare us your phoney war of words with Gove. When all is said and done, you and your party leaders down the ages share a major political responsibility for the horrors of the 20^th century (as well as the devastation of Iraq in the 21^st). History could have been different if ordinary working people had been led by lions and not tame political donkeys.  

Paul Feldman

Communications editor

The battle for revolutionary history

The plaque commemorating 17th century Leveller leader Colonel Thomas Rainsborough, unveiled in a Wapping churchyard yesterday, appropriately comes at a moment when a modest civil war has broken out about the country’s history.

Rainsborough, one of the ablest and most courageous officers in Oliver Cromwell’s New Model Army, was murdered by Royalists in 1648, at the siege of Pontefract Castle.

His was killed a year after the famous Putney debates in which he and others put forward an Agreement of the People. Tensions between the democratic forces and the emerging new ruling class were at their sharpest. During the debate, Rainsborough made this epic, revolutionary statement: 

For really I think that the poorest he that is in England have a life to live, as the greatest he; and therefore truly, Sir, I think it clear, that every man that is to live under a Government ought first by his own consent to put himself under that Government; and I do think that the poorest man in England is not at all bound in a strict sense to that Government that he hath not had a voice to put Himself under.

 The Levellers’ demands were not realised during their lifetimes, but they put down a daring and far-seeing marker, to be partially realised in the form of parliamentary democracy.

Naturally, a period when Parliament and the Crown fought it out on the battlefield, ending with Charles I losing his head in 1649, is not exactly what education secretary Michael Gove wants to emphasise.

He has come under heavy fire for his new history curriculum, which is viewed by many as “too prescriptive and Anglocentric”. Enter radical historian Tristram Hunt, Labour MP for Stoke on Trent Central.

In yesterday’s Observer, Hunt lampooned pro-imperialist, ultra-conservative and ultra-successful historian Niall Ferguson. Ferguson, now a Harvard professor, who last year supported Mitt Romney’s election campaign, recently had to deny that he was homophobic. Ferguson had indeed made a personal attack on the economist, and old Labour idol, John Maynard Keynes which linked his sexuality to his ideas.

There can be no doubt that Ferguson has played a key role on the ideological front, with his histories of money, global finance, the role of the British Empire as well as in setting up the elite private New College of the Humanities in London.

Hunt is right to highlight the crucial importance of history in British public life and that the school history curriculum is, as Gove himself has said, “an ideological battleground for contending armies”.

Hunt goes on to praise the post-war schools of largely Marxist historians. For the first time writers like E.P. Thompson, Asa Briggs, Christopher Hill and Raphael Samuel provided an alternative narrative, based on the underbelly of historical change.

They played an important political role, particularly during the 1960s and 1970s, by revealing the social forces driving historical processes and the role of the masses in shaping change.

Hunt bemoans the “worrying conservative consensus” about “our national past”. And naturally the main media, which is indeed dominated by people like Ferguson and David Starkey, with their unashamed pro-capitalist political agenda.

This is not news. Marx pointed out long ago, that “the ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e. the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force.”

But should we be like rabbits in the headlights – terrified by the fact that the media and education is dominated by the ideology of those in power? Of course not. The notion that the ruling elites and their ideologists like Ferguson can brainwash us is a pathetic cop-out.

As one comment on Hunt’s piece says: “Information has proliferated so extensively that it no longer matters what people with agendas select or omit, the full story is only a few clicks away on the internet, and no statement can be made by a prominent individual without it being challenged.”

We should take courage and inspiration from 17th century revolutionaries like Rainsborough and continue his work by supporting the Agreement of the People for the 21st century.

Corinna Lotz

A World to Win

Death by a thousand cuts

When the Coalition announced its spending review, arts writers warned of a new dark age of philistinism that would follow in the wake of government cuts in arts funding. They were right.

The harsh reality of the triple attack on culture in Britain is now becoming clear: the £19 million cut (30%) in the Arts Council funding; a 26% cut in local government funds; and the targeting of humanities and arts courses in higher education funding.

Local councils are taking desperate measures to try and keep their museums and galleries open. Bolton council has admitted it plans to auction off two Picasso etchings and paintings by outstanding artists including Millais, Sickert, Burne Jones from its collection. The council hopes to raise £500,000 from this sale.

Meanwhile Leicester council has already done the dirty deed. In its wisdom, the council has already offloaded 124 paintings, including one by the Camden Town school colourist Frederick Gore, “for a very modest £148,000, and have earmarked another 100 worth, they reckon, £50,000”.

As Simon Tait of Arts Industry noted yesterday: “ The fact that Leicester’s pictures were all in store, having been bought to show in the city’s schools, doesn’t mean they weren’t important; just that the municipality didn’t know what it had got - nor, probably, what it's got rid of for small change.”

And that is just it – selling off precious public assets for “small change”, just as Bury council did a few years back when it sold a Lowry from its collection, is an expression of total moral and political bankruptcy. In North Yorkshire, the council is cutting arts spending by 89%. In Somerset and Moray council funding arts organisations are being cut 100%. Moray Council was the first Scottish local authority to propose cutting its entire arts budget.

The response of Labour’s shadow culture secretary Ivan Lewis to the looming cultural dark ages, bleated out at a State of the Arts conference in February, is that a “new covenant” was needed so the strongest would support the weakest.

Tristram Hunt, historian and Labour MP for Stoke on Trent Central, shares Lewis’ abject “divide and rule” strategy, pitting the major cultural centres against the regions. Now he is demanding that top museums and galleries should start charging. If “American tourists and continental mini-breakers have no problem paying” entry fees elsewhere in Europe , he opines, “why not a fiver for London’s great galleries”. This, he claims astonishingly, is a “truly equitable” policy.

So museums must introduce a nationality test before admitting anyone? Or will there be a means test? The mind shudders. And all because Hunt like his New Labour colleagues shares the Coalition’s “there is no alternative” to the corporate business, profit-driven economic model.

Others argue that the way forward for the arts is for closer ties with business and more philanthropy. But a February report by Art and Business shows that 80% of FTSE 100 companies give nothing at all to the arts. Philanthropic giving has fallen by 17%. Business investment has fallen by 11%.

Many artists and arts administrators have spoken out to express their horror at what is happening. Turner prize-winning artist Anish Kapoor last week warned that it would take decades to recover from the damage caused by current cuts.

We should reject the death by a thousand cuts being promoted not only by the Coalition government but its so-called Labour opposition. What is required is an alternative, not-for-profit approach to the economy, in which art and culture are not viewed as a luxury or an “add-on” but as central to what makes us truly human.

Corinna Lotz

A World to Win secretary